'The Street Sweeper:' A Q&A with author Elliot Perlman

In his panoramic new novel, “The Street Sweeper” (Riverhead, 624 pp., $28.95), Australian writer Elliot Perlman uses the friendship between a death camp survivor dying of cancer and an African-American janitor in New York City to explore both the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis, and the deep and lasting scars of American racism through the last century.

Lamont is an ex-con who is desperately trying to hold onto a good, straight job while he searches for the daughter he lost when he was imprisoned. As he is being treated for cancer at the hospital where Lamont works, Henryk tells Lamont the story of the year he spent working in the ovens at the Auschwitz death camp. Elsewhere in New York City, a college professor named Adam is on the cusp of losing both his job and his lover. With a dozen major characters and a large supporting cast, Perlman drills down into race riots and church bombings in America while chronicling the Holocaust. The book moves furiously to the heroic and doomed attack by concentration camp workers against their Nazi guards, which resulted in the blowing up of a crematorium. Perlman has crafted a lyrical and complex work handling taboo subjects of hate, persecution and mass murder.

Perlman, 48, is the author of the acclaimed “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley from his home in Melbourne.

Q. What was the first part of “The Street Sweeper”?

A. I was living across the street from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. If New York is a microcosm of the world, that city block that the hospital is on is a microcosm of New York. I’d see people of all different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds milling on the sidewalk, many of them smoking, most of them strangers. I’d hear all kinds of accents. I wondered what would happen if a friendship blossomed out of this. What could be more unlikely than a youngish African-American man becoming friends with a Holocaust survivor?

Q. Why did you decide to tackle the difficult subject of the Holocaust?

A. My background is Jewish on both sides. My grandparents fled Europe in the late 1920s, when there was anti-Semitism, but nothing like what would happen 10 years later. We lost nearly everybody in my family. I knew I was going to write about the Holocaust.

Q. Did you know you would write about the crematoriums of Auschwitz?

A. Yes, I knew I had to go all the way. When you read a novel or memoir about the Holocaust, the pain can be relentless. In the architecture of “The Street Sweeper,” the novel goes in and out of a number of different people’s stories. There are some parts that are almost unbearable, but they don’t last very long. What liberated me to write about the Holocaust was something that (the writer and Italian Holocaust survivor) Primo Levi said, that language cannot do justice to the horrors of the circumstances that these people lived in. I realized I could only do the best I could.

Q. Why did you weave together the Holocaust narrative with the devastating effects of American racism?

A. I wanted to write about these two 20th-century wrongs without ranking them — to have them side by side. I had to do justice to the African-American suffering of the last 100 years, to personalize it, to give the reader a sense of racism at home and in the streets.

Q. You chronicle the true story of half-starved crematorium workers at Auschwitz who attacked their Nazi killers. How did you write it?

A. In Poland, I met the last surviving Polish-Jewish crematorium worker. He told me about the uprising. I wanted to make it gripping, but I didn’t want to trivialize it by turning it into a thriller. It was exciting when the Jews fought back. They knew it was then or never.